Mathematical Juxtaposition
by Devin Trinidad
Summary: In which a young Rose Tyler meets strange man who wants to solve her "problems." Why solve her problems when his fashion statement was just itching to be corrected? I mean really, bow ties?


_I have got a time machine, Dorium. It's all still going on. For me it never stops. Liz the First is still waiting in a glade to elope with me. I could help Rose Tyler with her homework. I could go on all Jack's stag parties in one night._

_~Eleventh Doctor, The Wedding of River Song_

* * *

Sometimes, and it wasn't all the time, Rose Tyler felt squashed.

Not literally, but some certain someone would try to turn that into a lame joke, which she had to consider and pretend to laugh at. (This is all in reference to the first statement.) Mind you, that certain someone definitely did not have his name rhyming with Rickey or Nicky. Nor were those two options his actual name. Now, before you readers start getting carried away, that this small event in Miss Tyler's life was not related to this ()-icky person, but more to that first sentence. While you may not have remembered what that first, brief statement entailed, Rose Tyler would have. She was undeniably certain that she was living underneath some god, demon, or spirit that wanted to suck the life out of her.

In short, the math problem that dared make itself known in the mixture of ink and paper was way too hard. If Rose Tyler was more a rebel—and she had a premonition that she would one day become more rebellious, at least she hoped—she would have made that sentence more colorful and less rigid. Unfortunately, she had to make do with balling up a piece of paper in her fragile wrist and throwing it in the nearby rubbish bin. Emphasis on her fragile wrist because when she threw that wad of offensive paper (botched up equations and eraser marks, the nerve!) the ball of crushed tree bark merely bounced off the bin and onto the ground. As what you readers probably can tell, Rose Tyler was not a basketball player or a mathematician. Both professions, which Rose would happily turn down whether or not she actually had the interest to do so.

Mumbling unintelligible little somethings under her breath (because if they were big somethings, her mother and that lady with the carriage and the mewling baby would have her head), Rose walked over to the crumpled paper and tossed it into the bin. Truly, she would have looked like a professional basketball player at that movement because this time she did make it in, except she didn't whoop and cheer for her accomplishment. You see, she was much more interested in getting her homework done, thank you very much. With much less vigor than when she retrieved the botched homework (her sluggish trudge looked more like a drunken slog), Rose Tyler set out to manually sharpen her pencil for the road ahead.

"Hard day at work, huh?"

Jumping out of her skin and hurtling back to earth within seconds, it was during that time when her body was releasing adrenaline that a stranger sat across from her at the table. (This stranger was…well, pretty strange. If a man with suspenders, tweed jacket, and bow tie did not register as strange, then you must be creepy yourself! Seriously, Rose Tyler found herself thinking. If I had a dictionary right now and looked up the definition of strange, his picture would be there in his bow tie filled glory.)

Retracting that previous statement in parentheses for lack of adding anything interesting to the storyline (her brain was pumping into overdrive because of the adrenaline…therefore, she really shouldn't be thinking silly things like that in the first place), Rose Tyler immediately regressed into the caveman phase of humanity. In other words, Rose Tyler immediately responded with the "fight or flight" attitude. (Let it be known that she was in the middle of the park with LOTS of bystanders who were ready cell phones and gossipy mouths.)

She grabbed her textbook from the table and placed it in front of her like it was a weapon. Clearly, she was using the right to FaceBook the stranger if need be. (And if he decided to Twitter around because of a book sized mark on his face…he did violate her MySpace within an Instagram.) {And if you did not appreciate my use of terms and wish to see the translation, then you are out of luck. The TARDIS Translation Matrix should have clued you in on early twenty first century slang and humor.}*

Despite her desperate attempts to enact the Me-No-Like-You-Cause-You-Creepy-And-No-Hip, the man in front of her merely shook his head and smiled at her. Remember that adrenaline I told you earlier? The one that caused her to pick up the book and brandish it around like it was some prized possession of Rassilon? Well, that adrenaline took a turn for a worse because now the adrenaline was forcing her heart to pump faster and now irrational thoughts were crowding her thoughts. Because of her fear, Rose Tyler had simply foregone the sane decision of asking him to leave instead of reverting to a troglodyte.

Then again, she was a talkative troglodyte.

So Rose Tyler did what an other troglodyte would do.

So she spoke.

"What are you doing?" She hissed as her fingers clenched the binding of the book. It was truly an amazing sight to see her very human skin turn alabaster within seconds. "Can't you see that this table is occupied?" Or that bow ties were clearly outlawed by the time you were born?

I can see that whoever is reading this is going to kill the author or you'll feel like choking the life out of Miss Rose Tyler. Before you do such a thing, I would like to say that she was clearly out of character for the last few minutes you have been slaving away reading this; prepare for an explanation.

One, she had just failed a maths test yesterday.

* * *

_**Fantastic Flashback Sequence of Fantasticness-ness**_

_Rose Tyler glanced in utter horror as a piece of a paper landed onto her desk with only the slightest of noises. The paper might have been light, but the dark red ink looked like it could the carry weight of armies. _

_She was going to be so dead, she thought._

_Without any other thought, the blonde threw the paper into the air and began to scream bloody murder._

"_NO!" Rose Tyler cried aloud as she angrily shook her fist at the sky. "THAT WAS MY MATH TEST, NOT A PLEA TO BE SACRIFICED SLOWLY TO MY MOTHER!"_

"_Rose Tyler, could you please lower your voice," her teacher sighed as she passed the rest of the papers. "I would actually like to hear resounding cheers from the students that __**passed **__their tests."_

* * *

Two, the ()-icky character hit on her repeatedly at school even though she said she would think about it.

* * *

_**Wibbly Wobbley Timey Wimey Flashback Sequence**_

"_I don't know, Mi—"_

"_That's a yes, yeah?"_

"_Wait, but Mi—"_

"_I'll pick you up at eight on Tuesday! Bye"_

"_B-but…NO! I SAID I'LL THINK ABOUT IT!" This was all said as she shook her still fragile wrist at the sky. _

"_Rose, sweetie," her friend cooed gently as she patted the blonde on the shoulder. "Do you really have to be so loud?"_

* * *

And finally, the giver of life decided to pay her a visit.

* * *

_**The ******* Doctor is Bringing Cool Back, Uh Huh ***_

_Rose Tyler hung her head low as she stared at the neatly wrapped package on the bathroom floor. Unlike the other two flashback sequences, this major life crisis was not "cool" enough to warrant a NOOOOOOO! Or an angry fist shaking. Instead, Rose Tyler merely comforted herself by eating and drinking chocolate like a chocoholic. _

"_Rose, darling, you're breathing too loud. Are you alright?" Her mother asked as she nursed a cup of hot chocolate._

_That's when Rose Tyler screamed._

* * *

So, as you can all see, Rose Tyler was acting completely okay.

Human.

And I bet that most people would have reacted the same way. (Unless you were of the male species. If I remember correctly, males don't exhibit traits of bloody water pistols during the preparation of fertilization.)

However, seeing as the ridiculous stranger was still smiling and inwardly laughing at the girl's face, you can pretty much guarantee that he wasn't human. Instead of acting rude and backhanding the girl like any rough and tumble man would have done, he gave her a gentle smile and gestured to the mathematics textbook that she was still clutching in her hands.

"Don't mind me," he promised her as he took the book off her hands and placed his specs on the bridge of his nose. "Just thought I'd like to help you knock off some problems!"

It was at the exact moment that Rose Tyler had done something that many humans have done. A simple something that got emperors assassinated, presidents put in office, and queens getting married to aliens who had no idea what he was doing when he tried to save the world from fleshy, humanoid suckers.* Yes, it was that simple action that would guarantee that anything Rose Tyler would want to do, she would not act upon. Why? That was because she had slightly let her walls down and her adrenaline was starting to disappear from her blood stream.

However, Rose Tyler was still a little suspicious that there was a strange man that was peering into her textbook like it was the dirtiest scum on the face of the Earth. Personally, Rose Tyler felt the same, but she still had that uncertain loyalty she had to that book because in a way, if she insulted the book, she was pretty much insulting her education. Which in turn, would be insulting herself. (She had every right to insult herself, she did fail yesterday after all.) With those thoughts in mind, she placed her elbows on the table and leaned her cheeks into her palms. Thus, she appeared to be an inquisitive scholar waiting for her teacher to start spewing out intelligible gibberish.

But, she was human.

She was also very curious.

"If you don't mind me asking," all sense of bravado gone after rage left," but what are you doing here?" Inwardly, Rose Tyler gasped at how rude she sounded—mind you, she was really rude before, but now she was aware of her actions—and slapped her mind's self silly. The awkwardness in the air merely intensified because the way the man stared at her…it was as if she should know him intuitively, but as to what, she wasn't sure. Feeling creeped out by the silence that the man was emitting—if a person can emit silence—Rose Tyler tried to break the ice. "Er, can I help you?"

Rose Tyler didn't know how to explain, but it looked like dead man Lazarus had come back to life. His eyes, misty and nostalgic, were now brimming with almost religious fervor. It was like the man finally realized that the answer to life was not forty-two, but it was somehow connected to her. While the blonde fancied that she would one day become important in the world, she had no intention to be this man's…anything, even if she were to help him with some problem.

"Nope! I am the Doctor and I am here to help!" Winking at her flabbergasted expression, he threw the textbook into the rubbish bin, causing a banging noise to be heard. Completely ignoring the fact that her book was absorbing the juices from previous excrement, Rose Tyler faced her companion with a look of utter mystification. "What?"

"You're a psychiatrist?" True, she might have gone off the deep end because of everyday hassles, but she was perfectly fine! It wasn't as if she some person who would get ticked off by small things on a daily basis. Oh, wait.

Possibly offended by his very being, the petite blonde leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms. "Mum didn't put you up to this, did she?" An eyebrow, still haven't been touched by tweezers yet, arched in an interrogative manner.

The man only mimicked her stance and Rose Tyler got the feeling that he was making fun of her.

"If that's what you like to think," the 'Doctor' stated smugly—how dare he!—as he looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. The fact that this brunette with his insanely square jaw and retro bow tie did not react to her hostile stance should have disconcerted Rose Tyler. Should have. But it didn't. Something inside Rose Tyler told her that he couldn't hurt her, even if his life depended on it. She didn't know why, but she felt like she had known him for a majority of her life. Now, that was disconcerting to think after having just talked to this man for only the span of at least ten minutes. Maybe less.

"I would also like to think that she's paying lots of money so that I can get a nice job, get married to a nice bloke, and give her the lot," Rose Tyler exclaimed. At the end of her little rant, her voice rose—punny, anyone—to that of a triumphant pitch. Disregarding the looks of the nice lady with the buggy, she stood up from the picnic table and slammed her fragile hands against the wooden surface. "How much?"

The man looked at her with an analytical eye. If there was anything the high schooler hated, it was to be stared at without any further comments. Just what was this strange man thinking? It irked Rose Tyler to no end. Just when she was about to leave and retrieve her disgusting book—it was already disgusting—from the receptacle, the man held up two fingers, put them into his mouth, and held it out high in the air.

Rose Tyler was beyond the boundaries of human comprehension as to what happened.

What just happened, the human thought.

"She gave me jelly babies instead of a jammy dodger," the man complained. The Doctor reached inside his tweed jacket, and pulled out a paper bag, which must have carried the delicious treats inside. "I would have went for a banana, but she said," and this is where the man giggled playfully," and I quote, I want you to die from sugar overdose rather than potassium, unquote!" Taking a baby from his paper bag, he inspected the jelliness of the product and plopped it into his mouth for safekeeping.

"Jelly babies," Rose Tyler repeated disbelievingly.

"Quite a lot really. Would you care for one?" The Doctor had a fistful of the small brutes, shoving them down his esophagus like Godzilla in Tokyo. Apparently, the man took notice of the way the teenage girl looked at him. There was a mixture of disgust, wariness, but there was a shining, wavering beacon of curiosity.

"No thanks," Rose Tyler mumbled. Idly, she wondered how she got into this situation and whether her book was going to smell like the baby formula the lady had so rudely dumped. (Notice how the adjective, nice, was no longer placed in front of 'lady.') "So, if you're the…" She halted unsteadily in front of his supposed name, but regained her voice when he nodded pleasantly at her. "Doctor…and if you're not a psychiatrist, then why are you here?"

"Didn't I tell you? I'm here to help!" Striking a heroic stance with his bag of jelly babies, Rose Tyler couldn't help but admire that he looked so nerdy trying to look like Thor from that American Avengers movie. It didn't help that he looked so helplessly cute when he did that. (On behalf of Rose Tyler and her embarrassment issues, I urge the reader to ignore that last phrase. Thank you and have a nice day.) "Because I'm the Doctor and that's what I do." Rose Tyler didn't know it—but she had a small inkling that she did—but there was something off about that cherry man's voice, but he was already off by her standards. (Let's be honest though, she's a girl. Therefore, probably more in tune with emotions and empathizing with the man. From the blonde girl's perspective, it seemed that the man was hiding something, something sad. She didn't question the fool's intentions though.)

(Okay, she might have questioned him a little bit, but who wouldn't?)

Feeling that maybe she should come down from her anger, she began to speak.

"I have to agree, doctors do help people," Rose Tyler conceded as she began to sit down from her rant. "But help me with what exactly?" Jumbled up reasons clouded her reasoning. Was he going to advertise some foolproof plan to convert her into a tie bow wearer!? Blasphemy, she was a girl of color and style, not some loony professor who had a fetish for sweets!

Rose Tyler's train of thought took a detour when the Doctor announced, "Your homework of course!" Sticking another jelly baby in his mouth, he gestured to Rose Tyler's notebook that was scribbled with a combination of notes and doodles. "Rose Tyler, good student, just needs to polish up on some algebraic equations!" Just what was it and his fetish for saying things with an exclamation mark at the end? Rose Tyler would not find the answer to that question because he was currently grabbing her notebook from the safety of her personal space and looking at it closely for him to inspect.

"That's mine and I don't recall doctors being tutors!" However, there was a teasing tint in Rose Tyler's voice. Something inside told her that she should drop the act and just go along with it. What's the worst that could happen? Carpe diem, her teacher would say.

"Tut tut, I know it's yours, I need to know what you're failing at and besides," as the perky brunette put the notebook down with a thump," you assumed some things a bit too much. But…you're only human and you're very young so I'll let that accusatory tone go."

"And you're not," Rose Tyler harrumphed as she wrapped her arms against herself.

"Not going to help you? Whatever I say is a promise, and I am a man of my word," the man hastily replied as he ripped several empty sheets from her notebook and some writing utensils from her pencil case.

"Whoa, I did not ask for help," Rose Tyler yelped as the Doctor leaped from the other side of the picnic table and onto her side for further aid. The blonde had conveniently forgotten the purpose of her question. She had also conveniently forgotten that the Doctor did not directly answer her question. Which, of course, was conveniently played to his advantage and convenience.

How convenient.

"No," the Doctor admitted as he wrote some equations and explanations onto the margins of the lined paper. "But you need my help, nevertheless."

Rose Tyler didn't know it, but she had just signed up for some hardcore tutoring.

* * *

_**Awesome Sauce Action Sequence Seen in Rose Tyler's Mind!**_

"_Geronimo! 2x + 3x equals!" The man leaped off Big Ben, a happy smile seen on his face. "Come on Miss Tyler, give me the answer!"_

"_5x, Doctor," Rose Tyler mumbled as she looked down Big Ben with a scowl. First algebraic problems, what next? British History 101?_

"_Take the plunge, Tyler! If it's the right answer, do it!" _

_Rose Tyler had no choice but to take part in his ridiculous practice._

* * *

Rose awoke from a strange dream.

It was 10 AM.

On a weekend.

Why did the sun have to be so bright?

A young lady snuggled into her blanket, feeling the warmth of her encased body heat surround her like it was another blacnket. Unfortunately, the moment of euphoria was only interrupted by her dearest mother.

"Rose," her mother banged on the door. "Wake up sweetie, your tutor is here!"

The blonde in question assented as she dragged her lazy bum off her atrociously pink bed and into the kitchen. That was when she noticed three things.

One, there was a square jaw sitting at the dining table.

Two, the bow tie appeared to be sporting yellow polka dots on a purple background.

And three, apparently there was some type of light source on top of the chin. Why did he have to wear such a bright smile?

Without any fanfare of politeness, Rose Tyler merely crashed into one of the chairs and ruffled her dyed hair.

"You again?" She muttered.

"This time your dear old mum got me jammy dodgers!"

Rose Tyler sighed as she took a seat at the dinner table, resignation seen clearly on her features.

"Why do I get the feeling that I'm being squashed?"

* * *

*And if he decided to whimper around because of a book sized mark on his face…he did violate her space within a second.

* I blocked out Eleventh because Rose had not met the Doctor yet. Nor did she have an inkling as to what regenerations met at this point of time. Furthermore, it can be also used a double entendre for those with much stronger and mature minds.

*Day of the Doctor anyone?

I sincerely hope that I haven't made anyone too OOC, but this is kind of silly so you don't have to take it seriously. I bid you all adieu.


End file.
